Neale Donald Walsch on Larry King Live
(a CNN interview, 7th April 2000)
Transcribed by Avenarius from a video and audio recording
(utilizing and thoroughly rewriting a rough transcript downloaded from CNN.com)
© 2000 Cable News Network. All Rights Reserved.
[Suggestions for corrections may be submitted to a@avenarius.sk]
(a CNN interview, 7th April 2000)
Transcribed by Avenarius from a video and audio recording
(utilizing and thoroughly rewriting a rough transcript downloaded from CNN.com)
© 2000 Cable News Network. All Rights Reserved.
[Suggestions for corrections may be submitted to a@avenarius.sk]
LARRY KING, talkshow host: [...] And then, he says having
conversations with God can change your life. Best-selling author Neale Donald
Walsch is here, too.
[jingles]
[...]
We’ll come back with Neale Donald
Walsch, and we’ll talk about a phenomenon, his books, Conversations with God.
Don’t go away.
[commercial break]
We welcome now Neale Donald Walsch.
His latest book is Friendship
with God;
there you see its cover. He’s the author ofConversations with God – three different books; those conversations on
the New York
Times best-sellers list for more than 130 weeks. He kind
of burst on the scene.
Are you a minister?
NEALE DONALD WALSCH, author, Friendship with God: No, I am not, except to the degree that
we’re all ministers.
KING:
Where did all of this start?
WALSCH:
It started in the darkest moment of my life, Larry, when everything was going
wrong in my life: my career was reaching a dead end —
KING:
What career was it?
WALSCH:
I was a radio talk show host, actually.
KING:
Many have ridden that role.
WALSCH [laughs]: And reached the same dead end!
KING:
So it wasn’t going anywhere?
WALSCH:
No, it wasn’t.
KING:
This was how long ago?
WALSCH:
About four years ago now.
KING:
Alright. What happened?
WALSCH:
In addition to that, I was watching my relationship fall apart – my
relationship with my significant other. It wasn’t the first time that I’d seen
that happen in my life, nor was it the second, nor, frankly, was it the third.
So I realized that there was something I didn’t know here about relationships,
the knowing of which would change everything. And my health, too, was falling
apart as well. I had a lot of chronic problems very early on in my life – from
lung problems to heart problems to arthritis, and you name it. So I got to the
age of 49, 50 years old and I said, “OK, what are the rules? Somebody tell me
the rules, because I don’t understand how this is supposed to go. I’ve done
what I was supposed to do, or most of what I thought I was supposed to do, but
nothing is working out for me the way I thought it would work out.”
KING:
So? You —
WALSCH:
So I called out in the middle of the night – one night I woke up in the middle
of the night, and I – I was searching for answers, four o’clock in the morning,
and I went into a darkened house and I really began screaming out silently
inside of myself: “What does it take to make life work? Somebody tell me! What
are these rules? And what have I done to deserve a life of such continuing
struggle?” And then I sat on the couch in my living room, stewing in my own
juice, as it were, and I – I asked God, I literally called out His name.
KING:
Were you a believer?
WALSCH:
I don’t know if I was or I wasn’t. I really don’t know.
KING:
Were you religious, did you go to church, synagogue?
WALSCH:
As a child, yes – but not at that point in my life. But I knew there was this
thing called God that was supposed to be real and supposed to be there.
KING:
And loving and caring.
WALSCH:
And loving and caring. And so I really called – I, what I did, I threatened God
at that point. I said, “God, either come to me now and give me some answers, or
I am out of here.” And I was —
KING:
Meaning suicide?
WALSCH:
Absolutely.
KING:
You were that low.
WALSCH:
I was that low. The nadir of my existence. And, Larry, I heard a voice as
clearly as I’m hearing your own now, right over my right shoulder; so clearly
that I turned around – I thought, literally, that someone had come into the
room, it’s four thirty in the morning – and the voice said, “Neale, do you
really want answers to all of these questions or are you just venting?” And I
can recall my response after I got over the shock of not finding anyone there;
I thought, “Well, I am venting, but if you’ve got answers, I’d like to know
what they are.” And with that, I received the answers to most – to the most
astonishing questions, and the most extraordinary answers, and as they began
coming to me and literally filling my mind, I thought I’ve got to write this
down, and I found, fortunately, a yellow legal pad and a pen that had been left
there on the coffee table, from the day before.
KING:
How do you know you weren’t, one, hallucinating (people do that) —
WALSCH:
Yes.
KING: —
imagining this voice?
WALSCH:
Yes.
KING:
Two, your own subconscious, in a sense, talking to you? You put it into words,
but —
WALSCH:
I don’t know, Larry.
KING:
You don’t know that.
WALSCH:
I don’t know.
KING:
So maybe it wasn’t God.
WALSCH:
Maybe it wasn’t. And the day that I start —
WALSCH:
Because I think that it was. I sincerely think that – that I was inspired by
the divine —
KING:
Why you?
WALSCH: —
but the day I lose my doubt about that, the day I just step away from doubt
altogether is the day I become dangerous. I have no intention of becoming
dangerous.
KING:
Why you? Why did God talk to you and not to him, and her?
WALSCH:
Actually God does talk to him and her, and to you and to all of us. The
question isn’t “Why me?” but “Why have I chosen to listen?” I think people
choose to listen to the God who speaks to all of us when people get to a point
in their lives when they’re – forced to or inspired to, one or the other.
KING:
What’s the first thing you asked?
WALSCH:
“What does it take to make life work? What have I – what am I doing wrong here? What am
I doing wrong here?”
KING:
And? What were you
doing wrong?
WALSCH:
Well, I was – the God said, I was misunderstanding the whole relationship of
God to us, and I was misunderstanding my whole relationship of myself to
everyone else. Basically, what God said, “What you’re doing wrong is very
simple: you think you’re all alone. You think you’re separate from everyone
else, and I’ll give you a simple solution in three sentences that will change
your life.”
I said, “Great, what is it?”
He said: “You’re one with everyone.
There’s no one who is separate from you. What you do for another, you do for
yourself. What you fail to do for another, you fail to do for yourself. It’s as
simple as that – I hate to be simplistic, but that’s the truth. But it will change
your life if you choose to not just hear that thought and conceptualize it, but
actually live it.”
And I chose to live it from that day
on.
KING:
And did you, therefore, start reading scriptures?
WALSCH:
No.
KING:
No. This is not, then, a Bible lesson.
WALSCH:
No, it’s certainly not.
KING:
This is not the Old or New Testament.
WALSCH:
No, it is not.
KING:
This is not Luke, Chapter Six.
WALSCH:
No.
KING:
No. This is you and God.
WALSCH:
Yes.
KING:
Do you ask questions about things people think about? “Did He have a Son?” –
those kinds of questions.
WALSCH:
No, I don’t. I only asked the kinds of questions that my soul yearned to know
the answers to, that dealt with my own life.
KING:
Living questions.
WALSCH:
Living questions. “What is right livelihood? What is the proper expression of
human sexuality? What is – what brings good health to people? What –” But most
important of all, “What is stopping us from living the kinds of lives of which
we all know we are capable?”
KING:
How do you – when you first approached the publisher and said, “I’ve got a book
here. I always had all this trouble, and God is talking to me, and here’s what
He said” – were you thrown out of some places?
WALSCH [laughs]: I got rejection letters. They simply sent
letters to me.
KING:
Yes. Who finally took it on?
WALSCH:
Hampton Roads publishing company.
KING:
Small?
WALSCH:
Small publisher, now a medium-sized publisher.
KING:
You made them medium sized, huh.
WALSCH:
I think to some degree I might have. In Charlottesville, Virginia, they had the
courage; they – they picked up the book, and said, “You know, this is
important, and people are gonna relate to this.”
KING:
More with Neale Donald Walsch and later your phone calls. The latest book is Friendship with God.
We’ll be right back.
[commercial break]
KING:
In a sense, Neale, even if you were delusional, if it’s helped, it’s worked,
right?
WALSCH:
Yes, that’s exactly right.
KING:
But you’re convinced it’s not delusional.
WALSCH:
Yes, I am convinced.
KING:
Do you hear Him now?
WALSCH:
Not in the sense that you would be referring to, no.
KING:
Well, how do you tune in to Him?
WALSCH:
Well, you see, God speaks to us in many, many ways, Larry, not just —
KING:
You said you heard a voice, though.
WALSCH:
Yes, I did. But that isn’t the only way that God communicates with us. For
instance, let me give you an example, when I say that God communicates to all
people all the time: I was on the airplane earlier today on the way down here,
and I thought, “My gosh, this is about Larry King, this is about a worldwide audience – what can I
say, what can I say possibly put into a few words in the few moments I have
with Larry?”, and I – I was looking for some – some inspiration, and my wife
sitting next to me on the plane said, “Look on your lunch tray.” I said,
“What’s on the lunch tray?” She said, “Look on your lunch tray.” Because we
look right past, we look right past God’s communications. I look and I say,
“Salt-and-pepper shaker, what do you want from me?” She said, “No, next to the
salt-and-pepper shaker.” I said – I’ve got to take this out. Um – a little
piece of paper next on the lunch tray, that was left there by the airline. It
says, “I will be glad and rejoice in you; I will sing praise to your name, O
Most High.” Psalm 9, verse 2. What was that doing on my lunch tray this
afternoon?
KING:
Because – because Alaska Airlines put it on all the lunch trays.
WALSCH:
God bless’em. But – but is that coincidence? Is that serendipity? Or is it – is
it possible, that God said, “You know what? I’m – I’m shameless. I will use any
device to get through to you. Look on your lunch tray next to the
salt-and-pepper shaker: it’s right in front of your nose.”
KING:
Can we – can we say that it all boils down to the Golden Rule?
WALSCH:
Absolutely.
KING:
Do unto others – if you live that way, everything else will fall into place.
[crosstalk]
WALSCH:
Everything is solved. Everything is solved – if governments would do that; if
people would do that with each other, everything would go away: all the – all
the disasters, all the pain of life.
KING:
What’s – what’s been the response from people? I mean, the books have been
extraordinary, almost two years on the best-seller list.
WALSCH:
Well, we’re getting 300 letters a week, Larry, from people all over the
world —
KING:
Who wanna know what?
WALSCH:
They want to know – first they wanna say, they’re saying “thank you”. The
demographic is 10-year-olds, teenagers, and 90-year-olds, and they’re saying,
“Thank you for at last – introducing me to a God I can fall in love with. A God
I no longer have to be afraid of. A God of my highest thoughts about what and
who God would be.”
KING:
Does this God explain to you – this God or the God – illness? You said you had
illness.
WALSCH:
Yes.
KING:
Does He explain illness? Does He explain death?
WALSCH:
Yes, indeed. Of course there is no death.
KING:
There is no death.
WALSCH:
Death is a great illusion.
KING:
Hmm.
WALSCH:
The body simply – the soul simply changes its form, and – and life is eternal;
life goes on forever. In fact there are two lessons that He taught me. He said,
“If you take these two lessons, everything else in your life will make sense
suddenly, and you’ll have no more worries.
“These two are quite simple: Life is eternal – and, We’re
all one. There’s nobody in the room but you,
in various forms. You treat that person across the table exactly as you would choose to treat yourself; and then
don’t fear about death because you can’t possibly die, but you’ll change into
another form.”
KING:
How about illness and pain?
WALSCH:
Illness and pain is the result of processes that have gone on all during our
lives having to do a lot with our beliefs, our thoughts, the way we take care
of ourselves, or fail to take care of ourselves, our environment and so forth.
But God says about illness and about every so-called negative experience – I
hate to be, hate to be almost predictable about this – but: in the seeds of
every human experience is an enormous lesson, an enormous gift, a wonderful
treasure, and if you look inside there for the treasure, you’ll discover that
you’ve been gifted all of your life.
KING:
How do you learn that from the illness of a child?
WALSCH:
It’s difficult, it requires enormous strength.
KING:
A 3-year-old – what lesson could a 3-year-old with cancer learn?
WALSCH:
I’m not sure that the lesson is for the 3-year-old; it may be for the
3-year-old’s parents.
KING:
But the 3-year-old is the one that’s gonna die.
WALSCH:
No, the 3-year-old won’t die, but the 3-year-old may in fact change form, and
when that 3-year-old changes form, all the people around that 3-year-old will
have come to understand that their lives have been touched by an angel.
KING:
You – you had interaction with Dr. Elizabeth Kubler Ross?
WALSCH:
I knew her quite well and I worked on her staff, yes.
KING:
Interviewed her a few times.
WALSCH:
Yes.
KING:
You knew her. You knew her then before you believed?
WALSCH:
Yes.
KING:
What did you think of her work with death and near dying?
WALSCH:
Well, I think Dr. Elizabeth Kubler Ross is one of the most extraordinary human
beings on the face of the Earth, and her contribution to the human race is
unspeakable.
KING:
But you were not a believer at that time, right?
WALSCH:
Not in the sense of having a thought about God as a workable part of my life
and – or having a friendship with God, no. I had a broad understanding that
there was this experience in the universe called God, and it was pretty clear
it was real.
KING:
The God – this God that communicates with you (and with all of us, you
say) —
WALSCH:
Yes.
KING: —
is He a – is He a punishing God? Is He angry?
WALSCH:
No, God is angry about nothing. What could God be angry about? God has
everything. God is everything. There’s no way you can hurt or damage God –
that’s virtually impossible. And God has no ego, so you can’t even hurt God’s
ego. So God has no reason to be angry, and therefore no reason to punish us.
KING:
How about judgmental?
WALSCH:
There’s no judgment in God whatsoever.
KING:
So if you’re gay, or you’re – there’s no sin, there’s no non-sin. What does God
do about the murderer?
WALSCH:
God does about the murderer what – what we should do with the murderer. Simply love the
murderer, and then do what is appropriate within our human constructions,
because on Earth, our human constructions require us to interact with each
other in ways that make sense in society.
KING:
But He doesn’t say if, if you’re gay or you’re – or you’re, supposedly – you
know, thing – you’re bisexual or anything like that, that we’ve come to deal
with as “sin”, and you’re gonna “repent”. Is there Hell?
WALSCH:
No, there’s no such place as Hell. What happens after death is not eternal
reward or eternal condemnation, but simply the continued evolution of the human
soul. Even the pope just said on the 20th of July, “There’s no such place as
Hell. And God is not a punishing God.” The pope said this.
KING:
How about guilt?
WALSCH:
Guilt is, um – I like “regret” as a better word. I think, I think that fear and
guilt are the only enemies of man. A thing Elizabeth used to say a lot – one of
my favorite quotes.
WALSCH:
Well, we had a – we – our relationship with God is like our relationship with
each other. It begins with a conversation; if the conversation goes well, it
moves into an experience of friendship; if the friendship goes well, it turns
into an experience of oneness with God, or what I want to call communion with
God. And so, unfortunately, not many people actually have a conversation with
God, because they’ve been culturally stigmatized into thinking that they cannot
have a conversation with God, that in fact God would never talk to any of us,
that God stopped talking to us thousands and thousands of years ago, and so to,
to announce that you’ve actually had a conversation with God, or even been
inspired by God at that level, is very risky.
KING:
We’ll be right back with Neale Donald Walsch, we’ll take your phone calls.
We’ll ask him what he does when he has a bad day.
Don’t go away.
[commercial break]
KING:
We’re back, we’re gonna go to your phone calls in a moment. Neale Donald
Walsch, what do you do when you have a bad day – bad mood?
WALSCH:
I try to help someone else from not having a bad day, because I learned a long
time ago: what I choose for myself to give to another —
KING:
You don’t get angry?
WALSCH:
Of course I do.
KING:
What do you do with anger?
WALSCH:
Well I try to forgive myself first of all, and then I ask the other person with
whom I’m angry to forgive me as well. And then I look to see what was the cause
of that anger. Of course, I take a – take a look inside, and I try to go to
gratitude: I try as quickly as I can to think of all the things that are going
right rather than all the things that are going wrong.
KING:
What does God say and what do you think about Judaism, Mormonism, Catholicism,
Protestantism, Buddhism?
WALSCH:
Wonderful teachings! Wonderful, wonderful teachings. One and all.
KING:
They disagree.
WALSCH:
They don’t disagree on the basics; they disagree on the fine print. On the
basics: love, do unto others, we are all one, be kind, be gentle – there’s no
disagreement. And the fine print we can talk about and discuss.
KING:
You ever ask about Christ?
WALSCH:
No, not specifically.
KING:
Why not?
WALSCH:
Because I didn’t have – see, because the conversation I had was about my own
life. It was about my own experience. It wasn’t about the grandest theological
questions of all time, it was about how do I get through Monday morning.
KING:
Do you get any comfort when you watch Sunday morning evangelicals?
WALSCH:
It’s not comfort that I would look for if I would choose to watch that. I look
for authenticity and truth, and what I see are people who deeply believe in
what they’re saying and what they’re feeling. And I honor that, and I say,
“That’s marvelous! Isn’t that great? —”
KING:
You don’t criticize them or knock them?
WALSCH:
I would never criticize anyone for saying what’s true in their heart.
CALLER:
Hi, Neale, thanks for your inspirational books. My question is, Is there a
specific age or a good age when you can start teaching your children about
these books?
WALSCH:
How soon do you start teaching your children about love?
CALLER:
From birth.
WALSCH:
Thank you very much.
KING:
You – you – you teach your children about God early?
WALSCH:
Yes, from the very moment that you can communicate intelligently with them. And
we talk about God in ways that are allowing the child to know that God is love,
that God is the wonderful energy of life, that there’s a spark of divinity in
every single human being, and that if we look for that spark of divinity,
they’ll have a whole different kind of life.
KING:
How do you explain: calamity, the flood, the hurricane, the wipeout of homes,
the death of hundreds and hundreds of people in one swoop – painfully dying;
how d’you explain that? Why would a good, loving, honest, wonderful God do
that?
WALSCH:
Well, God doesn’t cause those things.
KING:
He could stop it.
WALSCH:
Yes, I suppose one would imagine that God could stop it. But, um – you see,
every life experience is placed into our reality for a particular reason to
provide us an opportunity: to be and declare, to know and understand, to
announce and to fulfill who we really are. When we – God said to me, “I have
brought you nothing but angels and placed before you nothing but miracles, and
when you see your life as nothing more than a constant series of events that
have placed perfection right before you, an opportunity for you to decide who
you are and to experience it, then you will bless the day, and bless, bless,
bless all the things that have ever happened to you, whether you’ve labeled
them good, or labeled them bad.”
And Larry, I wouldn’t be the first
person to be able to say retrospectively that some of what I thought were the
worst moments of my life turned out to provide the grandest gifts, the greatest
teachings, and the most marvelous miracles. That’s a rather common human
experience.
KING:
How about the – the rich person is happier than the poor, and this quest for
money, and the mercenary aspect of this?
WALSCH:
I’m not sure that the rich person is happier than the poor. In the past five or
six years, I’ve come to know some rich people, because I tend to travel now in
circles that include people who are very wealthy. And I’m not seeing a higher
proportion of happiness there than I saw when I was living in the park on the
street – and I spent a year living on the street because I didn’t have a dime.
In fact, I found great happiness among street people – and great happiness
among wealthy people, too, but I didn’t find any disproportion of one to the
other.
KING:
What was it like living on the street?
WALSCH:
Well, at first it was horrible because I wasn’t prepared for it —
KING:
Where were you? Cold-weather climate or —
WALSCH:
I was – well, I was in a rainy climate in Oregon. It was raining every single
night, and I was —
KING:
Where did you sleep?
WALSCH:
On the ground. I had a sleeping bag, thank goodness, and I had a tent for some
of the time. And – but I can recall just asking God, “Just give me a dry
night!”
KING:
How many years ago?
WALSCH:
This was about six or seven, maybe eight years ago now – time flies.
KING:
If someone were to come over to you and say you’re going to be on a worldwide
television show talking about your fourth successful best-selling book – that
would have been a laugh to you?
WALSCH [laughs]: Yes, it would. But my experience at the
moment was a laugh to me as well. It’s only when I started laughing about what
was happening to me while it
was happening to me, that I managed to move away from it.
KING:
But you wanted to kill yourself?
WALSCH:
Yes, I did.
KING:
So you had hit the lowest —
WALSCH:
The nadir of my existence, absolutely, without question. But that was because I
didn’t understand what was going on! [laughs] I didn’t understand –
couldn’t see the gift!
KING:
Did you change that night?
WALSCH:
Yes; I cried, Larry. I cried like a child. I cried – as I was writing, I cried
so much that the tears were creating blotches [laughs] on the legal pad,
and I couldn’t read what I had written because the ink was all smeared.
KING:
You gonna have a kind of spiritual peace corps?
WALSCH:
Well, we’re looking now at ways to apply the extraordinary messages of these
books and of really all the great esoteric spiritual literature in the
practical matter of day-to-day life. So we’re putting together the New
Millennium Peace Foundation with Grand Master Son Who Lee, who’s a spiritual
figure in South Korea. And we’re going to start in South Korea, in Seoul next
year, and begin there a series of worldwide conferences where we’re going to
call together all the great spiritual leaders of the planet and ask them to use
their influence in a very public way and to say to the people, “What can we do,
if anything, to bring us together again? What can we do to unite North and
South Korea?” Fifty years, Larry, they’ve been apart. And I – see, I want to
know, where is the spiritual leadership? You know, the pope made an
extraordinarily courageous trip to Israel recently, and that was an – that was
an important overture; but why did it take so many hundreds of years to do it,
is the real question.
KING:
Back with more of Neale Donald Walsch, his new one is Friendship with God. He’s the author of the famed Conversations with God, all three books on the New York Times best-seller list more than a hundred and thirty
weeks. More phone calls after this.
[commercial break]
KING:
We’re back, we’ll take another call for Neale Donald Walsch. Rockmart, Georgia
– hello.
CALLER:
Hello! Um, how are you?
KING:
Hi.
CALLER:
I would like to ask him, does he acknowledge other, uh, belief systems that
acknowledge other gods in different names, and does he mention that in his
book?
WALSCH:
I’m not sure I know how you mean, or what you mean by do I acknowledge them? If
you mean do I recognize that they’re there and do I —
CALLER:
Right, that people —
WALSCH:
Of course.
CALLER: —
call them by different names.
WALSCH:
Oh, sure.
CALLER:
Do you acknowledge that?
WALSCH:
Sure, a rose by any other name is still a rose.
KING:
But what does God say He or She is?
WALSCH:
Why, God says – “First of all, what I am is – the real, the real question is,
‘What am I not?’ There is nothing that I am not.” So God says, “What I am is
all that is, all that was and all that ever will be.”
KING:
So He’s evil, too?
WALSCH:
Well, indeed – if, if, in fact, you assume that God is the all of it. But evil
only is as evil does, and – and nothing is evil unless thinking make it so. So
you get into a real intellectual discussion of, in fact, what is evil? And you
and I can agree on what evil is, and – and then two years later we might both
decide that —
KING:
I mean, we’d all agree that, say, Hitler was evil.
WALSCH:
Yes, we might – we might all agree on that.
KING:
Might?!
WALSCH:
Yes – well, indeed! Indeed, we – I think within the context of our human
experience we would, of course, agree that Hitler was evil. But supposing –
just supposing – that God said, “I’m going to send a soul to the Earth to show
humanity to itself, for the purpose of lifting humanity above what
it had become and what it had sunk to. Supposing I gave an assignment to a soul:
‘You’re gonna go down there and you’re gonna be the worst of it.’ And the end
result will be that the human race will lift itself at least one notch above
that, and never again go there.”
KING:
But a lot of people are gonna pay a price for it.
WALSCH:
Indeed, if you consider death a price, they have paid
a price for it. But supposing that there was a larger tapestry that we can’t
see. Just supposing we’re so close to the tapestry that all we see are the
threads, and – and we can’t see the tapestry itself. So – I think that we have
to stand back, and take a look at the whole picture.
KING:
You think God loves one nation more than another?
WALSCH:
No —
KING:
No?
WALSCH:
No, there’s no one nation under God, there are no chosen people, and – and there’s
no one who’s any more special than any other. The idea of superiority is the
most seductive idea ever visited upon the human race. And in Friendship with God, God said, “If you will simply eliminate your
idea that you’re somehow better than someone else, bring an end to better –
every pain on your planet that’s inflicted by humans, the one upon the other,
will go away overnight.
“Say this to your congregations,” God
said, “I dare you to challenge every rabbi, every minister, every priest, every
politician, every natural leader to say to their congregations the one
interesting sentence: ‘Ours is not a better way – ours is merely another way.’”
[silence]
KING:
Nobody running for office would say that.
WALSCH:
Of course, how could they? Because we have to demonize the other person. But
what the American public would do if – if George and Al would stand up on a
platform one day and say, “You know what? Mine is just my idea. It may not even
be the best idea. It’s just my idea; if you agree with me, fine – if you don’t,
that’s fine, too.”
KING:
“And I’ll listen to your idea. Maybe your idea might work.”
WALSCH:
Exactly! See, then what would happen? But that’s too intelligent. Except, I
think the human race is beginning to go there now. We’re beginning to
have —
KING:
Wackos would go crazy. [laughs]
WALSCH: —
less and less patience with these. [laughs]
KING:
Why you? Why you, Neale? Why is He talking to you?
WALSCH:
He’s talking to all of us, every minute of every day.
KING:
You’re writing it down, though.
WALSCH:
Yes. Now why did I write it down? Because I – I was desperate. And I didn’t
write it down to write a book – I never intended to write a book. I wrote it
down to keep a record of these inspiring thoughts that were coming to me and
gradually changing my life. So I kept a record of them, but in the middle of
the dialogue, it was said to me, “This will one day become a book.” [laughs]
And I said to myself, “Oh, yeah! This I gotta see!” But, you know, when God has
His mind made up, watch out.
KING:
We’ll take a break and be back with our remaining moments with Neale Donald
Walsch, the author of Conversations with God; the new one is Friendship with God.
Don’t go away.
[commercial break]
KING:
Neale wanted to add something on – on – about Hitler, elaborate a little bit.
WALSCH:
Well, you know, Larry, I want to be real sensitive to this. This is a very
sensitive question, of course, and I don’t want to be perceived as having made
light of what happened during the Hitler experience. But what God said to me in
the dialogue among many comments about Hitler – because He talked about Hitler
in the book a lot, actually – but one of the most important things He said
about Hitler was, “Neale,” He said, “the horror of the Hitler experience was
not only that a Hitler came along, but that so many people went along. Not only
that Hitler killed millions of Jews but that millions of Jews had to be killed
for Hitler to be stopped.”
So there’s a lesson here. And the
lesson is, that there’s a little bit of Hitler in all of us. And the wiping out
of people is a wiping out of people, whether at Auschwitz – or at Wounded Knee.
[silence]
KING:
There are degrees, though.
WALSCH:
Indeed. Indeed, there are. And I think that Hitler was sent to us as a – as an
example of the lowest degree, the lowest to which we can go so we will never forget and never go there again.
KING:
Do you think there’s more of a spiritual hunger now than ever before? And if
so, why?
WALSCH:
I think because the human race has lost patience with itself. We’ve looked at
how we’ve created life, we’ve looked at how our institutions are working or not
working – politics, education, spirituality, religion, economics – and we said,
you know, we’re going into the 21st century and we still haven’t got the most
basic problems of human experience solved. What could we do – what don’t – what
don’t we know, the knowing of which would change everything?
KING:
How do you account for that since technologically our advancements are
incredible? The advancement of the human mind, I think someone said, is up 50
years.
WALSCH:
That’s correct, and I, I account for it because I think we’re too focused on
everything but human consciousness and spirituality and matters, even, for that
matter, of the mind.
KING:
And one of the reasons might be we don’t think we go on forever, right?
WALSCH:
I think so. I think – and the other reason —
KING:
Most people think dying is it.
WALSCH:
Is the end of it. My father did. He looked at me at 83, God bless him, a couple
of months before his death, and he said, “Neale, what’s the answer? What’s this
all about?” And I looked at him – of course, I didn’t have anything to say to
him at that point, I didn’t want to – but when I walked out of that room, I
thought to myself, “God bless him, and help me not get there at 83 and be
asking a question like that.” But, you see, I don’t think that my father really
did a lot of reading, he didn’t do a lot of soul-searching – he was involved in
that physical, here-and-now world.
KING:
What do you make of all of these people now communicating with people like your
father?
WALSCH:
I’m not quite sure I understand the question.
KING:
Communicating with the dead?
WALSCH:
Well, I think it’s possible to communicate with the souls who have left this
particular plane of experience, and I think we should not write that off.
KING:
Have you tried?
WALSCH:
No. I have no need to. I’m – I’m communicating with the – with the big voice.
KING:
Heh! You’re going to the top, right?
WALSCH:
Straight to the top. [laughs]
KING:
There’s no political involved here, right?
WALSCH:
[laughs]
WALSCH:
There’s a book called Communion with God, which is coming out in October from the Putnam
publishing people in New York City. And that talks about the experience that I
discussed earlier, where a conversation leads to a friendship which ultimately
produces such a high-quality friendship that you feel one with the other. And
we can have exactly this kind of relationship with God. Mystics have written
about it and talked about it from time immemorial: and that is the experience
of oneness with all that is, which I’ve chosen to call Communion with God.
KING:
What worries you the most?
WALSCH:
Nothing. [pause] Well, I – I – that’s probably a lie. It was a snap
answer that I felt good to say. The truth? [pause] That I might be one
day disingenuous, inauthentic, think too much of myself, imagine that I know
something more than somebody else knows, and get run away – and let this thing
run away with me.
KING:
Ergo ego.
WALSCH:
Ego.
KING:
Thanks, Donald. Neale Donald Walsch. His latest book is Friendship with God, he’s the author of the Conversations with God – a series of books.
[...]
Thanks for joining us. From Los
Angeles, good night.
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